Sunday, June 7, 2009

Catalyst::View::Mason Documentation ne Implementation

I've got an old gentoo Apache mod_perl Mason site which I maintain for work. Mostly it is used for mining data from our less than desirable issue tracking system (Soffront Track) in order to help make realistic guestimates of what we can deliver and when.

It is running on an old quad xeon box that we'd experimented with, and decided not to use in production. Since work is a "Microsoft" shop, it has long been an item on my todo list to move it over to a windows box... but for some reason, I've never really gotten around to it.

However, a couple years back I did do the least amount of work necessary to get it to run in a windows w/ Catalyst::View::Mason environment. I've changed laptops a couple times since then, Perl 5.10.0 was released and Catalyst 5.8.

So last week, I reinstalled the latest version of all of the above on my laptop so I could take my work with me on the go.

I found that I had to add:__PACKAGE__->config(use_match => 1);

to my ...::View::Mason.pm for backward compatibility.

What was slightly annoying, is that while this was ultimately easy enough to find and fix... it isn't what the README says (http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/FLORA/Catalyst-View-Mason-0.17/README):

"use_match" Use "$c->request->match" instead of "$c->action" to determine which template to use if "$c->stash->{template}" isn't set. This option is deprecated and exists for backward compatibility only.

Currently defaults to 1, to avoid breaking older code, but new code should always set this to 0.

You are exactly right. I hadn't updated it in years. I'm not in the practice of updating stuff just because updates exist. I don't look forward to figuring out what's changed and what's broken as a result.

And you are also right. A documentation patch would have been nice. I'd actually intended to do just that, but my plane was boarding, and I never got around to finishing the post. My apologies.

However, characterizing the mild writeup of my experience with Catalyst::View::Mason as a rant doesn't do much to encourage me to spend any more time on it... helping you or others. You catch more helpers with honey than vinegar.

Thank you for your work with Catalyst::View::Mason. It has made migrating from Mason to Catalyst much easier. I appreciate the gift of your time and efforts. If we ever meet at a conference, the first beer is on me.